5.

Wow. After five long years, it feels great to have a new site.

Truth be told, I’m incredibly uncomfortable with this redesign. Which is awesome. Though it may not look like it on the outside, my approach to this redesign is very experimental and different for me. I think the power of CSS and its methodology has over-templatized our industry, some to great value and others not. Targeted art direction and interaction design are often sacrificed for efficient maintenance and reuse. For this site, I’m bucking the idea of “the template” and instead designing only what needs to be designed, when it needs to be designed. When abstraction is in direct competition with the opportunity for delight, I’ll opt for the latter.

We’ll see how that goes.

CMS who?

There’s no content management system behind this site. That’s right: just hand-coded HTML pages. As someone with absolutely no server-side programming skills, the thought of managing the content management system both bores and scares me. I know nothing of caches and unexpected strings, .htaccess, memory allocation, and improperly formed queries, so I’d rather just avoid it all together.

It also allows me to have a fully synced local copy with version control, without worrying about which database is the most current. Beanstalk and a handful of Git commands make it super easy to keep the site updated everywhere.

On help.

Throw just about any client or project at me, and I can hit the ground running. The one exception seems to be my own site. I’ve done about 16 versions of this redesign that I wasn’t happy with.

So I reached out to one of the best, my good friend Kevin Cornell. We talked for a while and did some design exercises, which ultimately led to the version you see now. Just goes to show how valuable talented, objective, and hilarious friends are.

Mr. Cornell: I’m in your debt.

I’m looking forward to what I can do with this new site. Hope you are too.